Looks like my recent 500GB external hard drive purchase was worth the investment; M.’s Ho Chi Minh Trail documentary shoot has just been extended, and God willing, I’ll still get to edit it once they get all the footage — 60 hours and counting. He just wrote from Vientiane, Laos:

> The more we get, the bigger this trip gets. We leave
in a couple days to Cambodia, to pick up the trail
through the eastern highlands, then on to Vietnam to
try to interview some of the old guys there. And we’re
planning a cross-country road trip this summer to find
a bunch of vets, pilots, etc who served here. Going to
need one hell of a hard drive and far too many months
once this whole thing is over. Photo editing, writing,
film editing… Sure we’ll look back to our hardest
days on the trail as a walk in the park after a couple
months pop-riveted to our computers. Can’t wait to
show you some of this…I’ll talk to you from Saigon.

Joshua has come to visit me for the weekend. This is him flashing the “gangsta salute” in my cubicle.

The following I’ve typed as it appears in the present issue of the New Yorker. I think it is heavy but beautiful, enough to warrant another pitiful poetic documentation in the cavernous, infinite (in the sense of being without form) memory of cyberspace — which reminds me: SDR, if you’re reading this, I miss you.

MEMOIR, by Vijay Seshadri

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now —
radioactive til the end of time –
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.

Me (Reading a poetic verse in chapter 13 of Lord of the Rings to E. & I. as their bedtime story of choice): “Not all those who wander are lost.” You know, guys, that’s actually quite a well-known saying.
E & I: (Reflective pause)
E (age 6): It’s true, you know. I mean it’s true in real life: “Not all those who wander are lost.” You know why? You wanna know why?
Me: Why?
(Extended pause)
E: God.

I hate science fiction almost more than root canals, and I hate fantasy science-fiction even more than that. Which is why I call it “Lord of the Stupid Rings” when I. taunts me with requests to read to her at night. But I love the kids. In all their untamable brilliance.

I’m learning Flash. Sloughing through the tutorial lessons, currently. They’re painfully boring, but the written step-by-step process in Help > Lessons is more acclimated to my own learning style, versus my teacher’s very quick overviews in class where he rushes through a million steps but only explains every third step. I just need to catch up with the other students.

Guess what: there’s a possibility I might live in a HUGE $2750/mo house near Kendall and pay only $600/mo. Dang it! Why did I announce that? I jinx everything.

It’s snowing in Manchester, S. says. “See, our psychic connection has synched our city’s weather patterns,” I told her. She thought that was clever. I wish I could just jump in a little portal and beam over to Manch for a weekend, you know, eat some ceviche, talk international politics with Michel (that sounds so pretentious but I mean it in the least pretentious way) and argue over grammatical inconsistencies and brown bread with Peter, share eye shadow with the ladies. It’s all happening in some parallel universe, I think…

because I’m tired and lazy and the day was full of babies and high heeled boot purchases, and DeWayne is visiting the Bean for his poetry reading tomorrow — & because I’m making the trip in two weeks anyway.

By the time I got home, walking over five miles in 8* weather without eating for 7 hours (dang those crowds at Emma’s pizza!), it was all I could do to slump into bed and finally watch Napoleon Dynamite. The most exciting part of the weekend will be tomorrow afternoon, when I wake up and eat a bagel at Diesel.

I would pay big money for a professional massage right about now. Ironic that my roommate is a professional massage therapist. What’s that saying? “The shoemaker’s children…”

I can’t wait for Ry to come home.

This is Baby G. noticing and then sucking on my Baby-G watch. Due to cyber-ethical concerns, I generally don’t post photos of other peoples’ kids on my site, but this was such a funny moment I think it could almost be an advertisement for Baby-G (the brand, not the baby). Also, I would drop anything to take care of this kid.

Additional revelation on-edit:
I had a thought today: I know why babies are cooler than adults — I’ve finally figured it out: it’s because they communicate entirely by expressing emotion, whereas most adults spend a large majority of their time, if not a large part of their life, learning to mask their actual emotions with words, be it professional formal dialogue or “assertiveness” or familially/societally-enforced modes of conduct, whatever. The crappy thing about adults is that you end up spending half the length of every conversation trying to decipher what they really feel, regardless of what they say. I think this is why I’ve always had a stronger affinity for children/babies (and a quiet distrust of my own superfluous running dialogues, spoken and written). Babies let you know exactly what they’re thinking without ever opening their mouth. There’s an honestly in that I value more than anything else.

Tonight my mom went to a club outside Philly with four of her closest friends and four of their children and children’s friends to hear my best buddy Ry sing with his band. Mom’s not really into modern jazzy-folky-rock, but it gave her a good excuse to hang out with all her old girlfriends from high school.

“I love your daughter,” Ry told her after the show. “I love her too,” Mom said. In reality it was probably a funny, informal exchange, but in my mind it was epoc (in an emotionally self-indulgent kind of way): two people I trust most in the world got to meet eachother. And I couldn’t be there. This is one distance problem the Interweb cannot solve…

No, tonight I ate amazing Jamaican-jerk chicken with platanos and stewed collard greens and mashed sweet potatoes over at East Side Grill with S. from work, her ex-husband (who happens to be her best friend), and their two friends. We talked business: I’ll be designing her website, so I loaded up on pecan pie and decaf, they loaded up on Makers & Diet and Steller and we got artistic and conceptual; artistically conceptual, if you will. I hope I do a good job learning Flash so I can make her a nice site. I would like to accomplish something measurable and concrete in the realm of multimedia.

In other news, have you heard of Groove virtual office project management software? It’s like the coolest thing ever: on one platform, you can send and edit documents in real time, chat, post discussions, edit photos remotely with other people watching, whatever. I can’t even explain how cool it is. All I can say is if my office actually buys the software, we’re in for a major productivity dilemma, because I can accurately predict we’ll spend more time IMing and drawing mustaches on eachother’s pictures than we will managing projects. But that’s what office culture is about, I guess.

This weekend is packed, so I’ll see you all (virtually) on Tuesday. I’ve an a.m. appointment tomorrow morning with S. and E., then babysitting an adorable 1-yr-old, then hopping a bus to Brooklyn, though no one besides N. knows I’m coming. I will photograph the gates installation or die trying!!!

I hope no crazy stalkers are reading this (FBI, you don’t count; Bernick, you don’t either and you never call me) because they’d know every move I make before I make it. This obsession with documenting everything must someday end. Really though, my life is so not as interesting as that of other people my age — just more erratic.

Haaaaaaaa ha ha…
Boston’s version = way better.

I just watched my new DVD of Lola Rennt, possibly my favorite film EVER, with voiceovers by director Tykwer and actress Franka Potente. I liked how Tykwer explains that half the cast were related to one another, almost every supporting cast member is a famous leading actor in Germany, and I liked how Potente encourages everyone to regularly scream as shrilly as Lola does throughout the movie. “It helps clear the mind,” she explains. “It’s quite fun.” There was also a lot of great dialogue about shooting techniques, production technicalities, etc., all of which I found very helpful.

Meanwhile, here’s a story for you:

Once upon a time I finally went to my Digital Multimedia Art class at Harvard Extension, only to hear my name called as I was about to sit down. I looked behind me to see the current girlfriend of my former ex from years and years ago. We know one another and are friendly, despite the sordid history of how awful I was to her in college. Anyway, so I sat next to her for class — we work in a PHATTY Mac lab full of G5s and HUUUUGE widescreen monitors. There is a new professor I expected wouldn’t be any good, but I was pleasantly surprised at how great he is, which is another exciting thing. Anyway, we covered the basics of Flash animation with his big overhead projection guiding us. He went very quickly, and literally if you blinked you could miss a step. I got frustrated because I was trying to follow along and do the steps myself, but I’d miss something and then my animation wouldn’t work and I wasn’t able to ask for help. I looked next to me, where the ex’s girlfriend was sitting, and she was checking her email and doing other internet things the entire time. Never once did she open Flash. Then I noticed a couple other people doing the same thing. What is your problem, people? Don’t come to class if you’re just gonna check your email! I know for many it was an overview of stuff they already know, but they could have at least feigned attention. This just reitterates my high school decision to always sit in the front row of a class you deem important…because otherwise you risk getting distracted, and distraction isn’t condusive to earning four graduate credits from Harvard Extension.

Aside from the slackers in the back, there are some nice people in that class. I greatly look forward to the rest of the semester. Bring on the learnin’!

Ya.

In light of that, here’s what S. tells me I’m missing at our house in Manchester:

[3:30:06 PM] audubon says: so how’s the house?
[3:30:38 PM] shiva roofeh says: i think there was a mushroom growing in the upstairs bathroom
[3:30:46 PM] audubon says: ew, cmon
[3:31:02 PM] shiva roofeh says: i didnt think it was possible
[3:31:07 PM] shiva roofeh says: but angeline tells me it is
[3:31:16 PM] shiva roofeh says: peter very quickly cleaned the bathroom the next day
[3:31:29 PM] audubon says: oh my god
[3:31:34 PM] audubon says: i can’t believe it
[3:31:35 PM] shiva roofeh says: and i vacuumed the stairs and the downstairs hall
[3:31:39 PM] shiva roofeh says: and theres a mouse
[3:31:56 PM] audubon says: really? just one?
[3:32:09 PM] shiva roofeh says: it ran infront of me from the livingroom closet to the oven, ten about 2 hours later, it ran to the bathroom.. im sure theres more
[3:32:14 PM] shiva roofeh says: its a baby
[3:32:55 PM] audubon says: hmm…maybe peter can cook it
[3:33:02 PM] audubon says: make a nice peruvian dish..
[3:33:43 PM] shiva roofeh says: eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
[3:34:11 PM] shiva roofeh says: maybe itll go well with the mushroom